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Interview with Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire

DW: Kevin, thank you very much for your time. The Freespire announcement came as a surprise to many in the Linux community. Can you tell us what prompted the launch of a free edition of Linspire and why do you think this is the right time to announce it?

KC: I just hit my one-year anniversary as CEO for Linspire, but I have been with the company since the beginning, employee number one, and we're just hitting our 5th year. Wow! It's hard to believe I've been doing this for that long! We've had a fun and interesting history, starting back in the "Lindows" days, but we've had a lot of success and accomplished much. Today over 350 OEMs sell computers pre-installed with Linspire Linux and retailers such as Wal-Mart, Fry's, Micro Center, Target, and Sears are selling these computers.

We've learned a lot during the last five years, and two of the most important lessons were: 1) the open source and Linux community needs Linspire, and 2) Linspire needs the open source and Linux community. We've known the latter for a long time, and we started the Freespire project internally about two years ago. However, I think the timing is now right for us to do what we're trying to do with Freespire. Had we tried this a few years ago, I think a larger part of the open source community would have not understood why we were offering proprietary software as an option in the core distribution. Today, the vast majority not only understand this need, they welcome it. When I announced this at Desktop Linux Summit to hundreds of people, I didn't hear a single "Boo!" or "Hissss!" from anyone, but I saw a lot of heads nodding in agreement and heard a lot of applause.

DW: I guess you had discussed the idea with Michael Robertson (the founder of Lindows and Linspire). What was his reaction? Does he still take an active interest in Linspire or has he moved on to other projects?

More in Tux Machines

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Latest News

Tiny, stackable, Linux-based IoT module hits Kickstarter

On Kickstarter, Onion launched a tiny, Linux-based “Omega” IoT module, along with a dock, stackable expansion modules, a cloud service, and web app tools.
Onion’s Omega joins a growing number of single board computers and computer-on-modules for Internet of Things applications that have tapped Qualcomm’s MIPS-based, WiFi-enabled Atheros AR9331 system-on-chip. For a pledge of $25, Onion’s Kickstarter campaign offers the Omega computer-on-module combined with a “dock” that turns it into an sandwich-style single board computer.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

The LibreOffice project was announced with great fanfare in September 2010. Nearly one year later, the OpenOffice.org project (from which LibreOffice was forked) was cut loose from Oracle and found a new home as an Apache project. It is fair to say that the rivalry between the two projects in the time since then has been strong. Predictions that one project or the other would fail have not been borne out, but that does not mean that the two projects are equally successful. A look at the two projects' development communities reveals some interesting differences.

11 Ways That Linux Contributes to Tech Innovation

Over the past six months I've asked new Linux Foundation corporate members on the cutting edge of technology to weigh in on what interesting or innovative trends they're witnessing and the role that Linux plays in them. Here's what engineers, CTOs, and other business leaders from companies including CoreOS, Rackspace, SanDisk, and more had to say.